Ice Candy Man

234 Pages·0.944 MB·English

by  Bapsi Sidhwa

BAPSI SIDHWA
Ice-Candy-Man
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Praise for Bapsi Sidhwa
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
ICE-CANDY-MAN
Distinguished international writer Bapsi Sidhwa lives in America but travels frequently to
the Indian subcontinent. She has published five novels: An American Brat, Cracking
India, Pakistani Bride, The Crow-Eaters and Ice-Candy-Man, and has been translated into
German, French, Italian and Russian.
Among her many honours Sidhwa received the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s
Award in 1994, the US National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1994, the Sitara-i-
Imtiaz, Pakistan’s national honour in the arts, and the LiBeraturepreis in Germany. Sidhwa
has also held the prestigious Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard.
Sidhwa, who was on the advisory committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on
Women’s Development, has taught at Columbia University, University of Houston and
Mount Holyoke College, and currently holds the Fanny Hurst position at Brandeis
University.
Ice-Candy-Man (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Quality Paperback
Book Club selection), has been made into the film 1947—Earth by noted Canadian
director Deepa Mehta.
Praise for Bapsi Sidhwa
‘Bapsi Sidhwa deals with the partition of India, a subject as harrowing as the Holocaust. Before our disbelieving eyes,
she performs the remarkable feat of bringing together the ribald farce of Parsee family life and the stark drama and
horrors of the riots and massacres of 1947.
‘She has achieved the impossible through one masterly stroke creating a child’s world of home and games in the park
amidst a motley company. At the center of this world is the child, Lenny. For all that she bears the bitter burden of
history on her eight-year-old-shoulders, Lenny is not allowed to become merely the embodiment of an abstract idea.
Sidhwa’s triumph lies in creating characters so rich in hilarious and accurate detail, so alive and active, that long after
one has closed the book, they continue to perform their extraordinary and wonderful feats before our eyes.’
—Dawn
‘If you wish to relive the Lahore of the ’40s and ’50s, go no further. In Ice-Candy-Man the tale is told with skill and
craftsmanship unrivaled in the sub-continent.’
—She
‘Sidhwa’s humour comes in pungent one-liners and her style is highly visual.’
—India Today
‘Sidhwa captures the turmoil of the times, with a brilliant combination of individual growing-up pains and the collective
anguish of a newly independent but divided country. Sidhwa’s work—particularly the dehumanizing effects of
communalism she movingly reveals in Ice-Candy-Man—is painfully relevant to our present day India.’
—Economic Times
‘It may be that the atrocities of 1947 are best seen through the innocent, naïve eyes of a child, who has no Hindu,
Muslim or Sikh axe to grind … Lenny is free both from the prejudices of religion, and from the prejudices against
women, and the constraints she will be subject to as she grows older. The authorial voice (is) a powerful voice of
hindsight.’
—Ralph Crane
‘Bapsi Sidhwa cannot be easily labeled … She cannot be categorized as just a Pakistani novelist, she is much more
versatile. “Lame Lenny” can be related to Oscar of Gunther Grass’s Tin Drum. There are books about boys growing up
(Mark Twain’s Huck Finn), however Sidhwa’s novel is unique as it establishes the girl-child’s point of view.’
—R.K. Dhawan
‘Sidhwa’s evocation of a Lahore childhood, seen through the eyes of a precocious child called Lenny, is as sweet and
enticing as the popsicles that the hero of her novel sells. It is a passionate account of Partition told through the cooling
mists of Parsi humour.’
—Parsiana
‘Lenny can be compared to the persona that Chaucer adopts in his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, rendering
credibility by being almost a part of the reader’s consciousness … With the wonder of a child she observes social change
and human behaviour, her persona a source of sharp irony.’
—Novi Kapadia
‘Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man is a bold experiment in narrative strategies and time, in which the unspeakable horrors of
communal violence are told mainly from a little girl’s point of view.’
—Times Literary Supplement (TLS)
‘In this rich, original novel Sidhwa contrives, without fake naïvete, to tell the story through the eyes of a sharp,
inquisitive eight-year-old girl Lenny, who has a crippled foot and is cared for by a beautiful young Ayah. Lenny is
established so firmly as a truthful witness that the mounting unease in Lahore, the riots, fires and brutal massacres
become real through the child’s experience. The colossal upheaval of partition, when cities were allotted to India or
Pakistan like pieces on a chess-board, and their frightened inhabitants were often savagely uprooted, runs like an earth
tremor through this thoughtful novel.’
—Sylvia Clayton
‘With skill and sympathy, and a delightful sense of humour, Bapsi Sidhwa shows the small girl Lenny growing up in
comfort and tranquillity. The book’s many characters all come to exuberant life, exhibiting the odd tastes and
unpredictable behaviour of real individuals.’
—London Magazine
‘Sidhwa’s Rabelaisian language and humour are enormously refreshing, especially in the context of modern Indian
fiction, which has tended rather towards the prim and stilted. In Ice-Candy-Man, as in her previous novels, she succeeds
in transmitting into English much of the spirit of Punjabi language and culture, which is nothing if not earthy. But her
prose is also both delicate and precise in its imagery and descriptions, with words chosen as carefully as pieces of inlay
in a marble wall.’
—The Literary Review
‘Like all Sidhwa’s work, the novel contains a rich undercurrent of legend and folklore. It combines Sidhwa’s affectionate
admiration for her own community with a compassion for the dispossessed. Her own childhood memories give the novel
further depth and resonance.’
—The Oxford Companion To Twentieth-Century Literature
in English
‘A fluent, fast moving narrative of wit and wisdom.’
—Irish Times
‘A born storyteller, an affectionate, shrewd observer … she writes with authority and flair.’
—New Statesman
‘Ice-Candy-Man is extremely taut, highly sensitive and its heart-rending realism is best brought out with the familiar
elements. The treatment, much to the fulfillment of the reader, is not only delightfully different but also inimitably
exclusive … Sidhwa’s somewhat Joycian insight into child psychology and keen observation of child behaviour is what
makes the book so compelling and virtually unputdownable.’
—Miscellany
‘The brilliantly created Indian characters in this novel are made with a real face, that turns at times into a mask of horror
and at others into a peal of laughter … Of all the marvellous people brought to life in this novel there is one who
signifies resistance to change and uses the chaos around him for his own malicious ends. And so in the end there is one
person who comes out unscathed and no wiser from the brutal pain of Indian independence: Ice-Candy-Man.’
—Weekly Mail
‘As the ambiguities and contradictions residing in the political situation in the Punjab are explored in the course of
Lenny’s narrative, so examples multiply of Sidhwa’s talent for fusing broad humour and trenchant criticism, concrete
observation and imaginative insight, the realities of everyday existence and the abstractions of politics and religion.’
—Third World Quarterly
‘Without a word of protestation or preaching and without histrionics, Sidhwa has written one of the most powerful
indictments of the riots which occurred during the Partition.’
—World Literature Today
‘The novel is about the slow awaking of the child heroine both to sexuality and grown-up pains and pleasures and to the
particular historical disaster that overwhelms her world … compulsively readable.’
—Observer
‘A powerful and dramatic novelist.’
—The Times
‘Sidhwa, a Parsee living in Pakistan, is a rarity even in swiftly-changing Asia—a candid, forthright, balanced woman
novelist. Her twentieth century view of Indian life can only be compared to V.S. Naipaul’s. Sidhwa is among the most
invigorating Indian writers.’
—Bloomsbury Review
‘Ice-Candy-Man is a novel in which heartbreak coexists with slapstick … and jokes give way to lines of glowing beauty
(“the moonlight settles like a layer of ashes over Lahore”). The author’s capacity for bringing an assortment of
characters vividly to life is enviable. In reducing the Partition to the perceptions of a polio-ridden child, a girl who tries
to wrench out her tongue because it is unable to lie, Bapsi Sidhwa has given us a memorable book, one that confirms her
reputation as Pakistan’s finest English language novelist.’
—New York Times Book Review
‘Bapsi Sidhwa has turned her gaze upon the domestic comedy of a Pakistani family in the 1940s and somehow managed
to evoke the great political upheavals of the age … and I am particularly touched by the way she has held the wicked
world up to the mirror of a young girl’s mind and caught so much that is lyrical and significant … a mysterious and
wonderful novel.’
—Washington Post, Book World
‘Much has been written about the holocaust that followed the Partition of India in 1947. But seldom has that story been
told as touchingly, as convincingly, or as horrifyingly as it has been by novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, seeing it through the eyes
of young Lenny … there is great humanity in this novel.’
—Philadelphia Inquirer
‘Reading Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man is like foraging through a tableful of discounted Swatch watches, and finding a
gold Rolex … it illustrates the power of good fiction: a historical tragedy comes alive, yielding insight into both the past
and the subcontinent’s turbulent present.’
—USA Today
‘Bapsi Sidhwa is a writer of enormous talent, capable of endowing small domestic occurrences with cosmic drama and
rendering calamitous historical events with deeply felt personal meaning. Her Ice-Candy-Man is a lively, compelling
novel, ambitiously conceived, skillfully plotted and beautifully written.’
—New York Newsday
‘Set against the partition of India, this fast-paced, seriocomic saga tracks the daily peregrinations and capricious thoughts
of Lenny who unwittingly learns that people and events are not as “transparent” as she had thought.’
—The Miami Herald
‘Imagine a child skipping innocently through the carnage of war. The child’s lighthearted presence makes the
devastation around her all the more heartbreaking. This is the effect of Bapsi Sidhwa’s compelling novel.’
—Milwaukee Sentinel
‘Readers soon come to realize that they are seeing 1947 Lahore through a skillful narrator’s eyes (as) street scenes, as
well as family life, come alive. Sidhwa provides a vivid, realistic picture of Indian family life and human interaction …
with an introduction to what continues to happen (in the sub-continent) today.’
—Arizona Daily Star
‘Ice-Candy-Man is a superb novel, brilliantly and lovingly written. It is also a masterful work of history as it relates
political events in the most simple but also most humanly meaningful terms, with comedy and anguish, through the eyes
of a child.’
—Albuquerque Journal
‘Sidhwa’s viewpoint is of someone to whom the scenes she depicts are known with great intimacy. As foreign readers
we’re invited to learn what it was really like to live as an Indian in those years of violence. Lenny has the privilege of
detachment: she gives us the story whole, instead of in fragments.’
—Remark
‘For one of the most important appealing narrators you will ever come across, for a compelling and illuminating view of
a moment in world history, and for clear-eyed insights into human nature, read this book.’
—Reading Woman
‘Sidhwa is a superb storyteller, sprinkling the book with tersely-captured vignettes, which increasingly knit together into
a story of passion and betrayal, “the unscrupulous nature of desire” and “the pitiless face of love”. It’s a great, thronging
bazaar of a book, bustling with riches.’
—New Internationalist
‘This exquisitely written, tightly constructed novel offers an engaging glimpse into Asian life and a vivid record of a
dark chapter in history.’
—Masterplots: Women’s Literature
‘Bapsi Sidhwa is technically Pakistani, but literature has no need of partitions, particularly as Sidhwa’s novel Ice-Candy-
Man is one of the finest responses made to the horror of the division of the subcontinent.’
—The New Yorker
‘The originality and power of Sidhwa’s splendid novel on the partition of India and the subsequent communal violence
derived from her choice of protagonist: Lenny, an eight-year-old Parsee girl from Lahore, a spectator living in the midst
of, but apart from, the rising tensions among Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh … Throughout, the novel sustains the vitality of
Lenny’s world with a series of wonderfully comic scenes. Highly recommended for all libraries.’
—The New Yorker Library Journal
‘Sidhwa’s luminous present-tense prose is laminated with the magic of childish wonder … She manages to do justice to
the complexity of racial, ethnic, and religious violence that accompanied the partitioning of India … Richly layered, both
realistic and magically evocative, as well as topical: a novel that brings to triumphant life an India that “has less to do
with fate than the will of men”.’
—Kirkus Reviews
‘The novel’s politics are effectively juxtaposed against a lush, sensual center, as the author’s prose lingers on the hot, dry
Lahore streets … A novel to savor.’
—Booklist
‘Lenny’s honesty is compelling, and the reader, like many in the story, cannot help but trust her. She is alternately
thrilled and frightened by the events she dutifully records, and so in the end, is the reader.’
—Publishers Weekly
‘Ice-Candy-Man is a multifaceted jewel of a novel. Lenny is as striking a creation as Harper Lee’s Scout, who plays a
similar role in To Kill a Mockingbird.’
—Houston Chronicle
‘Sidhwa is the kind of writer who catches you by surprise. In the subtlest of ways, she teaches and edifies as she
entertains.’
—Radcliffe Quarterly
‘Sidhwa is a feminist and a realist. One sees in her women characters the strength of passion, the tenderness of love, and
the courage of one’s convictions.’
—Belles Letters